There is not enough grain capacity provided by reopened Ukrainian ports to get stores cleared out there before the 2022 harvest can come in.

That is according to Ukraine’s deputy minister for agrarian policy and food Denys Bashlyk, who cautioned that the rail movements of grain proved insufficient in shifting the enormous volumes in need of export.

Minister Bashlyk told a Ukrainian Agrarian Business Club (UCAB) webinar that the pace of grain exports was accelerating with the reopening of key heavy ports on the Black Sea.

Figures cited by the deputy minister put cereal and oilseed export volumes at 4.6m tonnes for the month of August, up from 2.7m tonnes the previous month.

“The next challenge is infrastructure, logistics and infrastructure. This bottleneck is important to overcome right now,” he said.

Good yields part of the ‘headache’

CEO of the Continental Farmers Group Georg von Nolcken echoed the minister’s remarks, stating that many of the storage facilities earmarked for the second half of harvest 2022 were filled to capacity already.

Higher than expected yields were partly responsible for this, especially in the west of the country, where field operations were not disturbed by the presence of occupation forces.

“The portion of storage we had for the second half of the harvest is filling up already,” the head of the large cereal and field crop operation said.

“The majority of crops are coming in with good yields, not just with us but across most regions. The irony is that has become part of our headache,” von Nolcken explained.

“The big challenge is going to be how can we bring, with positive cashflow contribution, the grain out. Despite the fact that every single ship is a success, it is just not enough.”

The agri business chief emphasised that the cashflow element to mounting grain stores would become more problematic the longer it persisted, as farmers who could not sell grain will struggle with input costs for the coming winter plantings.